Tiananmen Mystery: Can China Hold an Open Terror Trial?

A deadly crash of an S.U.V. beside Tiananmen Square this week was a mystery from the moment it happened. The car, apparently carrying several people, veered off of Beijing’s main thoroughfare, the Avenue of Eternal Peace, on a busy Monday afternoon. It headed down a sidewalk full of tourists and pedestrians, and then collided with the marble Jinshui Bridge. The car burst into flames. Five people died, including the car’s occupants, and forty were injured. The site—at the gate of the Forbidden City, a few hundred yards from where Chinese leaders were meeting—is so central to Beijing political authority that it seemed to be an event calibrated for maximum attention.

Two days later, police declared it a “rigorously planned, organized, premeditated, violent terrorist attack.” The government announced that it had arrested five men in a nighttime raid, and the names of the detainees suggest that they may be Uighurs, members of an ethnic group that hails from Xinjiang, in far western China, which has been engaged in a separatist campaign for decades. In the police account of the events, the driver was a man named Usman Hasan and the two passengers were his wife, Gulkiz Gini, and his mother, Kuwanhan Reyim—also Uighur-sounding names. Police said that the license plate of the burned vehicle was from Xinjiang, and reported that the vehicle contained, as the Washington Post summed it up, “gasoline, a gasoline container, two long knives, an iron rod and a flag inscribed with extremist religious text.” After the crash, police said, the driver, his wife, and his mother ignited the gasoline and died in the fire.

There is so much about the case that is of interest to people in China. If this, as the government has now declared, is shown to be a terrorist attack, does that signal a new turn in the long-running conflict between Beijing and its population of twenty million Uighurs? Uighur groups who call for greater religious freedom and self-determination have clashed repeatedly with Chinese authorities, but they have rarely brought their protests to the capital. Why now? Is the conflict getting worse? Is there a precedent for a suicide attack involving a mother, son, and daughter-in-law? If there is to be a trial, what will be the testimony? What will the public be allowed to hear?

Earlier this year, Chinese authorities gave the public a tantalizing taste of the possible in the realm of law and order. In August, authorities tried Bo Xilai, the former Party boss, of bribery, embezzlement, and abuse of power. High-profile trials in China are generally tightly managed by the Party. They are conducted in a day or two, in secret, and reported after the fact, or else displayed in limited glimpses, under conditions of strict choreography. But Bo’s five-day trial offered something unusual: the court put out edited transcripts on its microblog; witnesses appeared in court, and the defendant cross-examined them; and the judges allowed Bo to complain about the conditions of his interrogation. As a court proceeding, it still had gaps—the transcripts left out some of the most sensitive bits—but it provided a relatively large window in a case of national interest, and stirred debate about China’s movement toward an independent judiciary with due process. The Party was so pleased with the reaction that the state media declared, “The open trials of officials like Bo mark great progress in China’s judicial system . The trial was a direct and strong response to reports that have been bashing China’s political and legal systems. For the public, it was also a vivid lesson for how the rule of law should be respected.”

At a moment when Chinese leaders are eager to shore up their credibility with their people, why not bring the Tiananmen case to to an “open trial”?

In recent years, there have been a series of clashes in western China; they are reported in the state press but only the barest outlines are ever publicized. There was an incident in Bachu County, for instance, in which twenty-one people were reported dead in April. It led to scattered articles about arrests, and then, in August, a sentencing, but hardly anything is known. When there was another incident, in June, which killed twenty-four people, the state press described it as terrorism and denounced it, but when the sentences were reported, in September, very little was known about the case. Foreign correspondents who have tried to visit the sites are generally blocked by local authorities, and unlike elsewhere in China, no verdict is read in full. Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, told me that “these announcements are less than convincing—pronouncements that ‘the facts are clear, the defendants have confessed’ are essentially boilerplate, and they almost never answer the questions raised by the cases, such as what was the exact sequence of events.” (In 2009, Human Rights Watch said that the trials of twenty-one Uighur defendants “did not meet minimum international standards of due process and fair trials.”)

Now that Chinese leaders have presented the Tiananmen incident as a piece of evidence in their argument that they face a serious terrorist threat, their people, and the world, will want to know more. It’s unrealistic to call for a new standard of radical transparency. (Terrorism cases in the United States have too often not been models of openness, either.) But this is a chance for a repeat performance. China’s new generation of leaders can now show that the Bo Xilai trial was not an aberration. After that trial, the Study Times, a weekly Party journal, wrote that the gestures of transparency “displayed China’s confidence: the confidence of the rule of law; confidence of the facts; confidence of the ability to distinguish right from wrong.” An open terror trial is another opportunity.

Photograph by Ng Han Guan/AP.

Evan Osnos joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008, and covers politics and foreign affairs.